


soft as a siren

by lovelit



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Horcruxes, M/M, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:40:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23253337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelit/pseuds/lovelit
Summary: There’s something right, somehow, about him having this diary, like finding an important possession you never noticed was missing until it’s found again, and maybe it’s a little weird but— but it’s magic, too, and Harry is still twelve and magic is still, well, magical.So he takes the diary with him to Hogwarts and he writes, and he writes, and he pours his soul into the diary and it isfamiliar.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Comments: 14
Kudos: 433
Collections: All The Nice Things Flash Exchange 2020





	soft as a siren

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reeby10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reeby10/gifts).



When Harry Potter is twelve years old, he finds a diary. Everyone at the Weasleys’ is sorting through the chaos of the day’s shopping trip to get at least partially packed up for Hogwarts, and some of Ginny’s books had gotten knocked on the floor and - in helping to pick them up - Harry finds the diary. It’s plain, but sort of nice and smart-looking, and Harry’s never wanted to keep a diary before but there’s something suddenly compelling about the idea, so he holds it up and asks if it belongs to anyone and doesn’t think to question just how relieved he is when nobody claims it.

He still doesn’t question the relief when he tries writing in it later and the words fade away, when Tom writes back to him. If anything it’s more, now. There’s something right, somehow, about him having this diary, like finding an important possession you never noticed was missing until it’s found again, and maybe it’s a little weird but— but it’s magic, too, and Harry is still twelve and magic is still, well, magical.

So he takes the diary with him to Hogwarts and he writes, and he writes, and he pours his soul into the diary and it is _familiar_.

* * *

Tom is curious about Voldemort, but he has the time to thread his questions in carefully amongst everything else; he’s curious about _so many_ things since his time, and Harry doesn’t often know the answers to Tom’s questions but he tells him what he knows. And he trusts Tom, has poured out his woes enough to him throughout the year so far that Tom feels like a friend, and so he tells him about the discomfort of being treated differently for something he did without his control or understanding and doesn’t even remember, and when Tom asks questions about Voldemort afterwards it only seems like a natural progression from that.

He tells Tom about the Dursleys, too, things he knows he’d feel embarrassed talking about with Ron or Hermione. He can’t explain why he’s not embarrassed to tell Tom, besides that odd familiarity about the diary, but after he’s told him a few things there’s a pause where Tom simply draws a slow line across the page - his way of showing that he’s still there, just thinking on his response - before, slowly, he writes. 

_I understand, Harry. I_ — and there’s another pause here, as though he’s reluctant — _grew up in an orphanage, and the muggles there were_ — a pause, shorter than the last — _not kind._

It’s a turning point. Harry doesn’t know it yet, and perhaps Tom doesn’t either, but something changes, there.

* * *

Everything is open between them, after that. Tom opens up about his childhood, even so far as slowly telling Harry about having hurt the others in the orphanage. And, well… Harry has never hurt the Dursleys, but— but can he really say he wouldn’t have, with the level of control that Tom had had? Maybe he wouldn’t have done it himself, but he’d definitely enjoyed what Hagrid had done to Dudley, and that had probably hurt him, hadn’t it? He’d had to have it removed by a doctor, after all.

 **I guess I never really thought to hurt them, is all.** he writes one day. **I think. Maybe I’ve wanted to? Probably. But mostly I always just ran away.**

Tom writes back, slowly, _There was never anywhere in the orphanage that you could run away without facing worse later. I suppose if there had been, I might have been the same._

Even now, Harry thinks that maybe that’s not true. Tom… seems like he might have found a way to hurt the people who hurt him, even if he’d had the option to run away. He thinks he ought to have a problem with that, that most people would think it was bad.

But he thinks about being like that, about if he’d had the courage and the control to get the Dursleys back when they hurt him, and he knows he ought to be glad he wasn’t. Somehow he can’t quite manage it, though.

* * *

Tom shows Harry the Chamber of Secrets, after Harry tells him about the zoo and the snake he’d accidentally set on Dudley. The Basilisk is beautiful, if terrifying, and she covers her deadly eyes over with filmy eyelids when Harry asks nicely and then twines herself around in circles so that Harry can settle in the middle of her coils. She doesn’t say it outright but he thinks she’s been lonely - she hasn’t spoken to anyone since Tom was in school, she says, and he knows now that that was something like fifty years ago.

“ _Time is not the same for a Basilisk as it is for a human,_ ” she tells him when he asks, once. “ _I have dwelled in this chamber for many human lifetimes, and I will dwell here for many more. It has been a mere flicker of time since my last master was here._ ”

“ _That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been lonely, though, right?_ ” Harry asks. The Basilisk doesn’t answer, though; only gives a great, wordless hiss that sounds something like humming to his ears, and then goes silent until Harry changes the subject.

He makes a point to visit her whenever he can, though, and he thinks she’s glad for it.

* * *

Harry barely notices how much he drifts away from Ron and Hermione this year. It’s not like they’re not still his friends, but between Tom and the Basilisk, well… sometimes he picks them over any of the Gryffindors, is all. Tom is familiar on a level he can’t put into words, beyond just the similarities in their childhoods, and being around him is just— it’s important, somehow. And Tom loves the Basilisk, Harry can tell that much, and she’s beautiful and lonely and he wants to help that, however he can.

So he spends more and more time in the Chamber with Tom and the Basilisk, especially as time passes and Tom grows strong enough, somehow, to be able to project himself out of the diary and speak face-to-face at times. And more time in the Chamber means less time around Ron and Hermione and the other Gryffindors, but Harry just doesn’t _notice_ it until they pull him aside in a quiet corner of the common room one day.

“We’re just worried about you,” Hermione presses. “You’ve been… distant, is all.”

“Yeah,” Ron agrees. “It feels like we’ve barely seen you all year, mate, except in classes.”

Harry doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t think they’d understand about Tom, and they definitely wouldn’t understand about the Basilisk. Tom has told him about wizards who can talk to snakes being feared, and when Harry had looked into it himself on Tom’s urging, he’d found out that Voldemort had been able to, as well, so he’s pretty sure it’s probably even worse now. 

Even if they were fine with that, they’d - certainly Hermione, at least, though he thinks even Ron might agree on this one - want to tell a teacher about there being a deadly magical creature living under the school. Maybe the teachers wouldn’t be able to find the Chamber, but there’s every chance that if they actually knew what they were searching for then they’d be able to find her even without Harry’s help, or that they’d be able to catch her when she ventured out to feed in the forest. And— and Harry doesn’t think that anyone would let her live, especially if nobody else could speak to her, and that thought makes his stomach swoop anxiously.

“I’m fine,” he tells his friends. It doesn’t sound all that convincing to his own ears, not while he’s worried about the Basilisk and worried about Tom and worried about the thought of people knowing he can speak to snakes like Voldemort, and realizing that makes him even more worried. Ron and Hermione aren’t the kind of people to just drop it, especially Hermione, and he can already see her opening her mouth to speak again.

And then he’s interrupting her before she can speak, and it’s his mouth and his voice but it’s not Harry that’s speaking. 

“I’m fine,” his voice says again, firmer this time. “I’ve just been focused on a lot of stuff this year, y’know? There’s so much about magic and the wizarding world and the castle and stuff that I never knew, growing up with the Dursleys, and I’ve just… wanted to learn more about it, I guess, but at my own pace?”

“Oh, Harry,” Hermione says then, her tone somewhere between fond and worried. “You could have told us that, you know that.”

Harry’s body laughs, an awkward little half-embarrassed laugh that sounds exactly like it would if it were actually Harry. He can feel Tom’s presence, now, wrapped around him like an embrace as he makes Harry’s body answer, “Yeah, um. I do know that, just… I don’t know, I guess I just wanted to get on with things on my own? No pressure that way, is all. And then it was just sort of… nice to have more alone time, too? Um, not that I don’t like hanging out with you guys! Just…”

Tom has Harry’s voice trail off, there, has him rub the back of his neck awkwardly and smile at them both like he’s embarrassed, and everything about it is exactly the way that Harry would have made the motions if he were in control of his own body.

 _I didn’t know he knew me this well_ , he finds himself thinking, and maybe he ought to be focusing on the fact that Tom is moving his body and speaking for him but, really, that just feels… right. Of course it’s a thing that Tom can do, although he couldn’t say why he feels that way. Tom knowing him well enough to do it so convincingly, _that’s_ the surprise.

 _Sometimes I feel like I know you exactly as I know myself_ , he hears Tom’s voice in his head, soft and considering even as, outwardly, Tom moves Harry’s body through motions and conversation as easily as if he does this every day.

Tom gets them up into Harry’s bed soon enough after that, extricating himself apparently without causing any more concern from Ron and Hermione - and having settled a good deal of their earlier concern, as far as Harry can tell. They only lay there, then, Tom not projecting himself outside and neither of them trying to speak to one another, for all that Harry can still feel Tom’s presence in his mind the entire time.

There is one thought that runs clearly through his mind, close to when he falls asleep, that he’s certain Tom hears; _I think that might be better than I know me_.

* * *

Somehow, when the truth comes, it’s not a surprise. Tom’s been dancing around it for months, in retrospect, dropping little hints and testing the waters, until he eventually writes in the diary, _Harry, have you heard of a horcrux?_

They both know he hasn’t, Tom intimately familiar with the limits of Harry’s knowledge of magic and the wizarding world at this point, but if he’s asking like that then he obviously wants Harry to ask. 

So he does, and Tom explains. That a horcrux is a shard of someone’s soul, sealed in an object, and that so long as the horcrux remains intact its owner will never truly die. That - and the writing is slower now, almost reluctant-seeming although Harry thinks that might be an act - the ritual to create one involves murder. That the ghost in the bathroom that holds the Chamber’s entrance is the evidence of his creation.

 _She was… an accident._ , Tom writes, although Harry doesn’t think accidents count as murder. Perhaps it’s different for the magic. He gets the feeling it’s not, though.

Tom wants Harry to ask whose horcrux he is. Harry knows that, because he knows Tom and he knows that Tom is that kind of dramatic and, anyway, he just… knows the shape of Tom’s thoughts, sometimes. Tom wants Harry to ask whose horcrux he is, which means he expects Harry to recognize who that person is, because otherwise there’d be no point to it.

Which means… there’s only one person it could be, really, isn’t there? There’s only one name that Tom would have kept so close to his chest for this long, and only one person Harry knows who hasn’t truly died even though he’s probably not truly alive, either. Especially since it has to be someone who’d have been willing to murder someone for immortality, who’d known the location of the Chamber of Secrets, who’d been able to talk to snakes.

Tom is sat in front of him on the bed, now, where he hadn’t been a moment ago, and Harry lifts his head and meets Tom’s eyes and says, tone carefully blank, “You’re Voldemort’s horcrux.”

Tom smiles at him, soft and smug as though Harry’s some pet who’s mastered a particularly clever trick. He reaches up, too, and touches Harry’s scar with fingers that feel ice cold but entirely solid.

“I am,” he says, his voice low, “But so are you, aren’t you?”

It ought to be some kind of horrifying accusation. It ought to disgust Harry, ought to make him reel back in anger and horror at the very thought.

Mostly, though, it just explains a lot. About how familiar Tom is, about how right his presence has always felt, about all of it.

Harry closes his eyes, and when Tom’s ice-cold hand shifts to stroke softly down his cheek, he only leans into it, and nods, and knows something like home.


End file.
